A Serb Orthodox monastery in religiously polarised Kosovo is breaking stereotypes by making its nuns learn Albanian so they can talk to Muslim villagers who come to pray at a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Muslims from all over Kosovo flock to the Sokolica monastery because they believe its 14th-century sculpture of the Virgin with Christ can cure deaf-mute children and help childless couples fall pregnant.

“When they ask how to pray, we tell them to pray in their own language and in the way they are taught to. We let them praise their Allah as we do our God,” the 67-year-old head of the monastery, Mati Makarija, told AFP.

For many, the “prayer of the heart” or the “Jesus prayer” is understood as a practice of personal devotion, a response to St. Paul’s admonition to “pray unceasingly,” a prayer said with the lips which descends from the head into the heart. Our prayer is to become eventually so much a part of us that our very breathing, our very living becomes prayer. However, the personal and interior aspects of this prayer are never separated from liturgical prayer or from our lives. Prayer of the heart should not be considered as an alternative preferable to the Hours or the Liturgy, just as the other elements of asceticism, such as fasting and the hermit life, are not in contradiction to receiving communion and communal liturgical prayer. Rather these forms of prayer complement and support each other. The Jesus prayer extends the Hours and the Liturgy through the rest of the day and night. The readings from scripture, the psalms and intercessions of the divine office, as well as the action of the Eucharistic Liturgy, nourish the rest of the life of prayer. There is no opposition between the prayer of the heart and liturgical prayer anymore than there is opposition between prayer and service, contemplation and action.

We will be paying the price for a very long time; men (and women), trained to kill and then subjected to multiple deployments, will never be the same:

Most members of the military establishment receive extensive training in combat techniques, including of course how to kill other human beings. One common drill at boot camp is to have recruits lunge repeatedly at mock human targets with mounted bayonets, shouting “Kill! Kill!” as they stab their imaginary victims. After months of such training, killing itself becomes banal, something normal and commonplace. The military culture of thoughtless submission to authority combined with heavy conditioning to snuff out human life creates a wide path towards the “great evils” that Hannah Arendt addressed.